fascism

occupation / innovator as

sociologist

nationality

German

university teacher

historian of the modern age

scientific organization

PEN Centre Germany

cultural studies scholar

philosopher

literary scholar

innovator in the field of

gender studies

is an ideology that derives its power from channelling the protean, potentially liberating force of human desire towards hatred, distorting it into a desire for death and blood.

We also see that many of them cannot reconcile acts of physical love with the nature of their own desires. When it came to these men, their murderous acts and their sexual problems were not coincidental, they were interrelated.  In explaining how, Theweleit takes exception with the left’s then-dominant explanation of fascism – that it was a result of pure irrationality, or repressed homosexuality. Some said it could be countered by the left mounting a renewed defence of progress and reason, or by beefing up alternative institutions that mirrored those of the fascists.

is shown by the diaries to have been taken up by men who saw their own survival, their own self-preservation and self-regeneration, as requiring acts of violence against women whom they despised.

In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic. In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. (Another way of maintaining their fragile sense of self is by slotting themselves into enveloping external structures like the armed forces or fascist youth organisations.)  In the soldier males’ journals we see them taking great pleasure, and building fraternal camaraderie, by murdering women, pairs of lovers and leftists of all genders.

Klaus TheweleitThinkers

Klaus Theweleit